No Billag Initiative - Pros - February 2018

Our topic here is the No Billag Initiative, which comes to a vote on March 4th, 2018. Billag is the company that has up to now been collecting the licence fees for TV and radio stations around Switzerland. The initiative wants to get rid of licence fees altogether and instead regularly auction them off. We sat down with a representative of each side to ask them why they were for and against the initiative, respectively.

Luca Urgese from the No Billag Initiative Committee is in favour of the initiative "because media diversity is important for me. [...] To keep media diversity, we think it's time to change the system of how we finance our media." And: "Today it's the case that you watch or listen to a small part of the whole [media landscape] offer, but have to pay for everything." He says that people have been waiting for years for a discussion about what 'public service' means and what it should encompass. "If this initiative gets approved, we have the possibility to see how the commercial market works and to discuss what doesn't work commercially and to discuss, in the normal political process, what we want to finance together and what [we don't want to finance]."

Listen to the interview with an opponent of the initiative here.